Leo and Taki make a fun pair. They remind me of me and my supervisor in Small Mammals, actually. Leo is like me, wanting to get as much done as possible, and finding things like cleaning my house and social niceties boring and pointless. And Taki’s version of “hurrying” being “walking slightly faster” is like my supervisor, who has no motivation beyond getting the bare minimum done, and constantly complaining he doesn’t have enough time to get everything done, even though he’ll sit outside the building smoking and watching TikTok videos for 10 straight minutes, multiple times a day! Anyway, I bet the version of Leo in the Department of Efficiency timeline has a real good time . . .

So, Naomi didn’t quite make it out alive in the end. She was a sympathetic figure, but I guess her reliance on control and forcing the world into the shape she wanted got in the way of learning how to resolve a story in a satisfying way, which ultimately returned her to the PPC’s radar and blocked her from being able to fight off Leo and Taki. Alas! Looks like she’s back in some unformed word salad now, so perhaps she’ll find a way to reform as a better character someday?

Applied Sciences certainly seems to attract the most physically outlandish agents, doesn’t it? I must ask, is Gazebo a dire gazebo? Also, it looks like Gazebo was about to say she helped Leo with a “quest for revenge.” Did Leo know Naomi in some way? Or does that just mean Leo was getting revenge for Naomi surviving her encounter with Kaito and Tanner?

Congratulations on getting through your first mission!

New word you taught me: “noogenesis”

One nitpick:
I ask (the Simpsons cast, not the voices . . .)
I think Simpsons here should be italicized, if I’m reading this correctly as “the cast of the show” rather than the specific family with surname “Simpson.”

—doctorlit wonders if he’s so out of touch; no, it’s the children who are wrong

Chapter: Pagecount / Wordcount

Prologue: 21 / 4781

Ch. 1: 19 / 3222

Ch. 2: 11 / 2038

Ch. 3: 10 / 1591

Ch. 4: 11 / 1908

Ch. 5: 11 / 1794

Ch. 6: 13 / 2115

Ch. 7: 12 / 1864

Ch. 8: 12 / 2021

Ch. 9: 12 / 1716

Ch. 10: 10 / 1622

Ch. 11: 17 / 2812

Ch. 12: 11 / 1754

Ch. 13: 7 / 1077

Ch. 14: 8 / 1304

Ch. 15: 27 / 4358

Ch. 16: 4 / 703

Ch. 17: 18 / 2670

Ch. 18: 8 / 1300

Ch. 19: 19 / 3389

Epilogue: 10 / 892

All told: 271 pages, and 44,931 words! Now, the pagecount is a bit misleading since the pages are formatted a little bit differently than most books are. The text is bigger, and the paragraph breaks are as well. You can get away with a lot more compression in a book. But that wordcount! 45,000. That's half a Discworld novel. That's 5.4% of Homestuck. That's a lot more than a little anxious boy like me ever could have expected. And a lot of these words are good! I think the ending's a little rushed, but I'll await final judgement on that.

Many, many thanks to everyone who's been reading so far. Your praise does not fall on deaf ears, and maybe one day I'll even be able to appreciate it.